By Nathan Barton

Good morning.  Nearing the end of another week with greetings to all the Free State Wyoming friends gathering this weekend, preparing for the inevitable.

Mama’s Note: Taking off to camp with the FSW bunch this weekend, no further posting until Monday morning. Have a great weekend, everybody!

Sometimes it takes MONTHS for the story of cops killing a man to make the news, as in this case from Florida.  This 61-year-old did some strange things, IF we believe the cops at all, but the cops clearly lied about him fighting, and them severely injuring the man, and then after he died from his wounds, attempted to cover up their crime: a crime not just of a single cop and partner, but of nearly a dozen cops, as seen in a video and with multiple witnesses.  Besides disbanding this police force, and branding (literally) these cops (including the two or three who just stood there and didn’t try to stop the killing) and prohibiting them from any job except maybe cleaning out sewers by hand for the rest of their lives, I’d love (in my cruel old age) see each of them forced to lie on a beach while a half-dozen recent retirees to Florida are allowed to kick them for a mere three times they kicked and beat and tased this man to death.  The brand (on the forehead and both cheeks could be something simple, like “KC” for Killer Cop.  Maybe the message will get through.

The Albuquerque homeless man gunned down in March by police WAS shot in the back and died of “homicide” according to the autopsy, but only after he was apparently tortured by police and in the hospital. Video tapes showed he was shot down while trying to gather his belongings from where he was “illegally” camping on “public land.”  Do I expect the Feebs to find the homicide was outright murder?  Do I expect ANY Albuquerque cop or official to suffer ANYTHING for this murder?  You’ve GOT to be kidding.  He wasn’t the first and he will be far from the last.  New Mexico is becoming more and more a typical Iberian police state, sister to Franco’s Spain, Peron’s Argentina, Diaz’s Mexico and Chavez’s Venezuela.   How can we end this sort of killing?  (Besides ending the power of the police force?)  By treating every killer cop to the same standard as “cop killers” – putting the three officers who together killed this man on trial, finding them guilty of first-degree murder and torture, and putting them down like the mad dogs that they are: as quickly and publicly as possible.

Veterans Affairs’ staffers now admit that they KNEW that what they were doing with the waiting lists was wrong, and that they could have done better.  I am sure the families and friends of the dead veterans (and those that will die prematurely) are very comforted by this recognition.  The VA employees are little different from the Dritte Reich arbeiters with their justification of “orders are orders.” (Befehl ist Befehl.)  As I get older and more cruel, I wonder just what punishment would be suitable for these VA employees: taking some money away from them is a fruitless endeavor and not forceful enough.  I would suggest that they be prohibited from receiving ANY medical care, even being allowed to buy over-the-counter medications, for a minimum of THREE times the average length of time these dead veterans were denied an opportunity for treatment.  If the delay in treatment for the veterans at, say, the Cheyenne Wyoming VA Hospital was 15 weeks, then those people directly responsible for it AND their supervisors to AT least the hospital commander/administrator should be allowed NO medical treatment for a minimum of 45 weeks, even if injured in an accident or if they have some kind of chronic disease.  Yes, some will almost CERTAINLY die, but that will make it clear to the survivors and every other government employee that there are consequences to treating veterans (or for that matter, citizens in general).

Forbes points out that a free market leads to better health care than the socialist model of the VA.  The VA budget could be divided into equal shares for every veteran, allowing them to purchase private insurance and use Health Savings Accounts (HSAs), which maximize patient choice and control over their care and their money.  It is a system that SHOULD have been implementing during and after the Great War or certainly the Second World War, but was not.

The Kansas City area Jewish community is now training on how to react to “active shooters” following the area killings a few weeks back.  They boast, “We are certainly a safer place now and we will have an armed presence, some of it visible, and we have been working with the FBI. This is going to be a very secure facility,” Jacob Schreiber, the JCC president told a local station.  As Mama Liberty pointed out, there is no mention, of course, of armed individuals [and many other PROVEN methods of defending themselves]. I’m sure the police “training” consists of cower… I mean cover in place, lockdowns and call 911. I’m pretty sure no mention is being made of armed self defense. I am sure that the Feebs will teach them to treat the “suspected shooters” with all the rights of the accused, and all about preserving evidence.  And of course, they will have all the necessary warning signs about no guns and the other garbage.  And the next hatefilled nutcase eager to kill someone will have a perfectly safe shooting range.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the “Regulators” are targeting for-profit colleges (that is, private colleges which are not “non-profit.”) They note that for-profit schools enroll 13 percent of all higher education students, but investigations are underway to determine whether the schools have misled students about the strength of their programs.  I cannot speak to all these outfits, and some are pretty good (National American University in South Dakota being one I’m told is excellent.)  But some are worse than diploma mills, and one of the worst from personal knowledge is Colorado Technical University, which has a large number of instructors who treat work that should be substandard for a seventh-grader as “college-level” work worth an A, and have “stipend” loan and tuition loan programs that are the envy of your local loan shark.

But the WSJ and anyone else with any common sense knows that the “Regulators” won’t  really change anything: this is nothing more than a way to get a cut on the goodies through fines and more time and people to “investigate.”  Actually both these regulators and the con-artist colleges (not just the for-profits: the state-owned/operated schools are even worse, when you get down to it) are in the same business: stealing time and money from people who don’t or can’t know better (in part because they are products of government schools!).